Reduce your sludge volume by as much as 90%: Acid Mine/Rock Drainage (AMD/ARD) from operating mines and abandoned mine sites require treatment to prevent adverse impacts to rivers and streams, which can produce significant volumes of sludge. Many AMD/ARD systems operating in the US today are facing constraints on their sludge storage capacities whether they are impounding the sludge above or below ground.

Veolia Water Technologies offers mining companies a proprietary process known as DenseSludge that reduces the volume of sludge by as much as 90% compared with conventional processes. This can extend the life of existing sludge storage facilities and/or minimize the amount of new storage that must be built.

This process also improves the utilization of lime and reduces its usage. This, coupled with the lower sludge handling costs due to the sludge volume reduction, results in significant cost savings.

Also, cost effectively removing selenium faces a number of technical challenges. While the mineral may be present in mine effluent in its easier-to-treat form selenite, more often it exists in its more difficult form as selenate.

In response to new regulations affecting the mining industry, Veolia has developed SeleniumZero, a process using a patented iron oxide-based media in conjunction with filtration, for removal of the most commonly occurring forms of selenium, including both selenite and selenate.